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PANORAMA
"CRISIS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE"
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC-1 DATE: 1:04:01
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JULIAN PETTIFER: Nearly a million animals slaughtered as Foot and mouth costs us nine billion pounds:
LES ARMSTRONG: If we don't learn something, if we don't put agriculture back in better shape, then
we've failed.
PETTIFER: Foot-and -mouth has generated new sympathy for farmers. Do they deserve it?
RICHARD NORTH: They take the money when things are going well, and then they whinge like crazy
when things go badly.
PETTIFER: Crisis in the Countryside - what future for British farming?
Blunderfield Farm
Cumbria
LES ARMSTRONG
It was Saturday morning. I'd just been down feeding some sheep and I went back up to the farm. I knew
my son was about, there was a door open on the end of the cow shed and I walked in the shed and he just
looked over the top of the cubicles and he said "Dad we've got it".
PETTIFER: Les Armstrong and his family farm 600 acres in Cumbria. Their livelihood came from a flock
of 1300 sheep and a herd of 500 cattle.
ARMSTRONG: The first symptoms of foot and mouth, you can see the beast nearly can't walk. It's feet
are so sore, feet are full of blisters. You can see how much froth its producing and how it's working its jaw,
really blistered badly in there. That tongue that's coming out of that heifer now, if you got hold of that now
the skin would pull off its tongue, just like an envelope. Once we discovered we had it, we decided, well
however long it takes, we carry on as normal. The cows were still milking and expecting to be milked, so
we did everything as normal, even though the milk went down the drain. Obviously they couldn't pick the
milk up after we had foot and mouth. And then when we got everything done we went in the house and we
left it to the slaughter men.
PETTIFER: Across the Pennines, in Northumberland, Peter Hogg has been living under siege ever since
the original outbreak of foot-and-mouth in February. The disease was traced to pigs fed on infected swill,
on a farm just a few miles away.
Causey Park Farm
Northumberland
PETER HOGG
It's an awful feeling you're in a state of limbo you really are. You feel as if you're locked away, you can't
do anything, there's nobody you can talk to, you can't leave the farm.
PETTIFER: But Peter can, and does, inspect his animals regularly. There's always the danger of
windborne infection, even though the livestock are confined in sheds on remote corners of the farm.
HOGG: These are some of our breeding ewes that we've got. They're stuck in the shed at the moment the
grass field that we did want to put them on is on the other side of the road, but the restrictions mean that
they're going to have to stay in there.
JULIAN PETTIFER
Until recently Peter Hogg's family farm has been profitable; not least because of EU subsidies - over £100
on every breeding cow. But in recent years, because of BSE, falling meat and cereal prices and a strong
pound, Peter claims that his profit margin is reduced to a few pence per animal. He says that disease is an
extra burden he cannot afford. Eventually the fires will die away and foot and mouth will be banished;
then livestock farmers will face fundamental questions that, unlike the disease, will not go away. Does it
make sense for farmers to restock and carry on, and do we want them to? Do we need farmers at all? And,
if we do, how much are we prepared to pay for them because at present they're costing us dear. Once the
smoke and the stench of death has cleared, it has to be conceded that the present system is a shambles. This
is the story of how the pressure for change is building, and the directions it could take us, and what it will
mean for farmers and for the rest of us.
Girls take over the land
MOVIETONE
NEWS
Before World War Two, much of our food was imported from the Empire. But when supplies were
threatened by German U-boats, everything was done to make Britain self-sufficient in food, including
bringing in women….
[News Footage]
"Of course down on the farm its the land girls who are doing all the work it happened before in the last
war."
PETTIFER: 'Dig for Victory' was the slogan as battalions of Land Girls joined the struggle to increase
production. As a reward for their valiant war effort, for the first time, farmers had a guaranteed market for
their goods, at a guaranteed price; and they started to enjoy modest prosperity. This is Crudwell in North
Wiltshire, on the edge of the Cotswolds, where I spent my childhood. It brings back personal memories of
a farming community that felt truly valued for helping to feed the nation and win the war, and is the school
where I learned my three R's. Looking at the old register, I see that I first entered its doors exactly 61 years
ago, on April the first, 1940. During the war years, most of the children I went to school with were from
families with farming connections, as I was. My father was the local vet. Today, out of 80 children, just
three are from farming backgrounds. It must be much the same in many rural communities. Dependency
on agriculture is no longer the foundation of the economy or of the social fabric.
But how has this come about? After the war food was still scarce and farmers were given fresh incentives.
Encouraged by government grants, farmers began to invest in new machinery, fertilisers and pesticides.
This was the dawn of the age of the feather-bedded farmer, the subsidy junky, taking his fix from the man
from the ministry.
Government Information film, 1941
Archive "Men from the Ministry"
Man from the Ministry: I came to see him about ploughing up some more grassland.
Farmer's Wife: Well I don't know how he'll take that. That will mean a tractor and where's the money to
come from?
Man from the Ministry: Well maybe we'll be able to fix that up for him.
Man from the Ministry: How about the field by the wood?
Farmer: No good ploughing that, it's too wet.
Man from the Ministry: Well do you feel a mild drain would do it good?
Farmer: Yes, it would, but who's going to pay for it?
Man from the Ministry: Well if you got a government grant would you plough?
Farmer: Oh yes, I'd be glad to.
PETTIFER: By the time foot and mouth last struck in last stuck in 1967, farmers who'd made the most of
the handouts were rich enough to swallow up their less acquisitive neighbours. Bigger, more mechanised,
farms meant the workforce was steadily falling.
BBC 'Horizon' 1774
When labour was plentiful, weeds were removed by a man with a hoe. But nowadays most jobs are down
4 feet above the ground from the seat of a tractor, and so the agrochemists have had to produce herbicides
and these do the hoeing chemically. In 1967 farmers spend 17 million pounds on herbicides.
PETTIFER: By the 70's when we joined the Common Market, grants and subsidies were consolidated
under the Common Agriculture Policy, the CAP, reinforcing the trend towards even greater production.
Remember the beef and butter mountains? - produced on ever bigger farms and by fewer farmers. At
Crudwell school, surrounded by agricultural land, the children now find the production of food to be a
strange and alien activity, as head teacher Barbara Harvey explained.
BARBARA HARVEY
Headteacher, Crudwell C. of E. Primary School
We have to make sure that we teach the children about food chains. They think that milk comes from
bottles not cows the same as a city child would.
PETTIFER: Luke Edwards one of the three children from my old school who still lives on a farm. His
parents have been finding life increasingly tough. 80% of subsidy money goes to 20% of the wealthiest
farmers while the rest struggle. Mike and Jayne Edwards are small dairy farmers, milking 65 Brown Swiss
cows on only 100 acres of land. Once they could make a living; but today, despite the billions we pay in
subsidies, they can't.
MIKE EDWARDS
At the end of the day there are only four or five major supermarkets. Really they can just do what the hell
they like with the price of milk and there's very little we can do to stop it, and we're at the stage now where
every litre of milk we send off we're making about 2 or 3 pence a litre loss. We just can't sustain that.
PETTIFER: Such is the madness of the system, that the Edwards family now, in effect, subsidise the milk
they produce. In order to keep the farm going, both parents do other jobs. Mike works part-time in Tesco
which, incidentally, sells milk at 46p a litre while he gets 18; and Jane has 3 jobs including delivering
chickens to butchers.
JANE EDWARDS: (In Van) All I ever wanted to do was farm and look after my children and it's not
worked out like that. It is hard on them. Their friends' parents have got time to take them out and go on
holidays and all the rest of it, and we are very limited in time and resources in what we can do with them.
Blunderfield Farm
Cumbria
PETTIFER: Back in Cumbria, Les Armstrong's big dairy and beef herds have been destroyed; 500 cattle
and 1300 sheep are left rotting on his farm, as are hundreds of thousands up and down the county. In time,
supervised by MAFF, the carcasses are taken away to be rendered. It will be many months before Les can
restock his farm, but the outlook is not wholly bleak. Distressing as thing are now, he'll soon get his
compensation for these losses and, like other livestock farmers over many years, he's had his share of the
billions the British taxpayer contributes to pay for animals routinely slaughtered for food. But those
subsidies are increasingly under attack and difficult to defend.
No other industry is subsidised in this way. Why should agriculture be?
LES ARMSTRONG
Well a lot of other industries are subsidised Julian. It just happens that ours is more visible. You know
we've lost about 40,000 people in agriculture in the last two years. If that was 40,000 people lost in any
other one industry there would be massive compensation paid in, and reinvestment in new industries and
such like. You can't do that in the case of agriculture. This is the countryside and it's far too wide-
reaching. Now I would argue that it's not so much how much money you put into agriculture. It's is it
good value for money? And the consumer has had a good deal out of the subsidies that have gone into
agriculture. Food, relatively speaking, is for nothing in this country. Now if we're going to carry on doing
that, we have to be supported.
PETTIFER: But is Les right in claiming that subsidies have brought us cheap food? We pour over four
billion pounds a year into CAP coffers from our taxes of which £3 billion comes home to British farmers.
That's £10 a week for a typical family - so how cheap is that? Panorama has calculated that an average of
14% of the retail price of cuts of Beef is subsidy. So for every £10 you spend on beef you've already paid
£1.40 in tax.
Professor JULES PRETTY
University of Essex
Each time you buy some food you pay for it three times. You pay for it once at the till, you pay for it a
second time through taxes that are used for subsidies and each year it's about 3 billion pounds worth of
subsidies goes to farmers, and you pay for it a third time to clean up the environmental mess created by the
modern system of farming that we have. Now that does mean that the so-called "cheap food policy" - that
we've been pursuing for the last half century - is a misnomer. I mean it's not cheap food. Food is not
cheap, it's expensive because we pay for it three times.
THE DEATH OF SUBSIDIES?
PETTIFER: As foot and mouth spreads in Britain, over in Geneva work is going on to eliminate one of
those farmer's perks. The writing on the wall spells globalisation and an end to agricultural production
subsidies. Many countries, at this meeting of the World Trade Organisation, are fed up with the way the
EU pampers its farmers by pouring nearly half of its entire budget into subsidies, and they're determined to
stop it. There's a powerful push to free up our markets for their farming products. The free traders are led
by 18 agricultural exporting nations, and they're getting mighty impatient, particularly the Argentinians.
Do people in Argentina - in your country - do they feel that it's totally unreasonable of the European Union
to try to protect it's farmers in the way that they have?
ILEANA DI GIOVAN
Argentinian Delegate, WTO
I should like you to hear what our farmers say about that.
PETTIFER: Well tell me what do they say?
DI GIOVAN: They say it's absolutely unreasonable and what is worse, they are increasingly asking the
government to take retaliation.
MAGDI FARAHAT
Egyptian Delegate, WTO
Over thirty billion dollars is being paid in export subsidies and some kinds of domestic support to farmers
in the more developed countries, when our farmers have to compete with no support whatsoever,
domestically or for export, then you can imagine the size of the problem and how daunting it is.
PETTIFER: You believe at the end of the day that this is the death knell, do you, for production subsidies
in the European Union?
DAVID SPENCER
Australian Delegate, WTO
We would very much hope that we can move away from subsidies which simply encourage over-production
PETTIFER: As the delegates argue their case in Geneva, it's clear their food producing potential is huge
compared to the tiny UK. Surely our farmers will struggle if there is equal access for all of their farmers, to
our markets.
RICHARD D NORTH
The Institute of Economic Affairs
We currently keep a large number of farmers in existence by keeping Third World produce out. Now
wearing a compassion hat for the Third World, we would be saying hang on, our food dollar in the rich
world could be buying a good farming income in Africa and India and other places, providing we didn't try
to keep a whole raft of middle income people in Britain and Northern Europe in general falsely, in
economic terms, producing food. I think we have a moral obligation to the Third World to say to ourselves
hang on, what we're trying to do here doesn't help some very poor people, it actively harms them.
Causey Park Farm
Northumberland
PETTIFER: As the far-reaching discussions continue in Geneva, back in Britain, Peter Hogg has learned
that his Northumberland farm is now officially in an exclusion zone. Nothing can move on or off the
property. If Peter's livestock survived the foot-and-mouth crisis, I'm unkind enough to remind him that he
may next face the loss of his subsidies.
If there is a genuinely free market in food and the British farmers are trying to compete with imports from
all over the world, what is going to be the consequence do you think?
PETER HOGG
People going out of business. What really worries me is that people are producing food in other parts of the
world without the environmental conditions, without the safety conditions, without the pesticide standards
that we are having to apply in this country, and with costs being piled onto us like that, there's no way we
can compete.
PETTIFER: But I've heard people say "well if it's not economic to farm, then people will not farm and we
shall have an unfarmed countryside. So what?"
HOGG: Well that might be an argument. People might just say exactly that, but the problem is that we'll
just end up with a wilderness. We'll end up with junk all over the place. Nettles and brambles and stuff,
people out of work.
A COUNTRYSIDE WITHOUT FARMERS?
PETTIFER: What if the countryside was unfarmed, what would happen to it? 75% of our land area is now
used for agriculture. If it's not used for crops and livestock, how will it look in the future? On this land in
Oxfordshire the farmer is still getting subsidies - but at present there isn't a sheep or cow or any crops to be
seen.
If we'd been standing here, Austin, three years ago, what would this have looked like?
AUSTIN RIGHTON
Lower Farm, Oxfordshire
This time of year this would have all been arable land - wheat, barley, oilseed rape, maybe some spring
crops.
PETTIFER: And presumably no water no water.
RIGHTON: No, that would have all been pumped off.
PETTIFER: Like 68% of British farmers, Austin Righton owns his land. Until 1998 it was an ordinary
family farm.
RIGHTON: My father purchased it in the Sixties as a wet farm and drained it with government grant
money, and thirty years later I'm more or less restoring it back to what it was, although there aren't the
hedges round that there were, and to a certain degree being grant aided to do that, which is quite ironic I
suppose.
PETTIFER: You say ironic. I was about to say doesn't it strike you as crazy that a generation ago your
father was being paid to drain this with taxpayers money. Now you are being paid to flood it.
RIGHTON: Absolutely and he was upheld at the time as what a wonderful man for draining this marshland
and converting it into very fertile arable land and, to a certain degree, I'm standing here now sort of
advocating the wildlife and the birds and the flooding and stuff. Yes it is, it is crazy. It is very short-
termism I would suggest.
PETTIFER: Although Austin was brought up in a commercial farming tradition, he's made a calculated
decision to opt for something different. Now he's sold his machinery, the only tractor on the farm is the
toy one driven by his son, Walter. Under a government contract, Austin is paid in taxpayers' money to
manage his land for the benefit of wildlife. Conservationists are astonished how quickly results are being
seen. As the water has returned, so have the birds that modern farming drove away.
SUE ARMSTONG-BROWNE
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
There have been benefits. There are now four times the number of breeding lapwings than there were
during the mid 1990s before this scheme was set up. We do need a large landscape scale change in
agricultural policy to enable our wildlife to fully recover.
PETTIFER: While many will rejoice at seeing the birds, they may complain that having subsidised farmers
to decimate wildlife with intensive agriculture, the taxpayer is now being asked to reward the same people
for making good the damage. Why replace a subsidised production racket with a subsidised protection
racket? A billion pounds has been earmarked for similar schemes over the next seven years in England
alone.
MARION SHOARD
Author, 'This Land is Our Land'
What the farmers did was they said "Right, OK, you don't want us to destroy the landscape well pay us to
keep it", and the idea came along that they should get flat rate payments in return for not destroying
landscape features. Now that was a very bad move. I don't think that that's right. I don't think that
taxpayers' money should be thrown like this, you know, when we've got people waiting for operations for
goodness sake.
NORTH: We don't need lots of well educated chaps on high incomes running around the countryside
doing conservation. It's a very expensive way of doing it - and we certainly don't need to pay for it by the
taxpayer. Why should all these kids, who couldn't care less about butterflies, pay through their taxes for
them? Its just nonsense. Let those who want butterflies buy them. It's easily done. You buy that brand in
the supermarket that is butterfly plus when it happens - and it will because the market will produce it.
PETTIFER: Our pastoral paradise was developed over centuries by traditional farming. Recent practices
have undermined the notion of farmers as custodians of the countryside. But some are now to be paid to
rediscover those skills. Tourism is worth £12 billion pounds to the rural economy - much more than
farming. As a nation we treat the countryside rather like a theme park for day trips and holidays.
Many of us prefer a rustic playground, not a wilderness. We like flowers and butterflies and birds and
manicured landscapes.
ARMSTRONG-BROWNE: Most of our wildlife depends on being managed in some way. The habitats
they live are farmed habitats. If you abandoned them, you wouldn't return to some wilderness paradise, you
would get scrub encroachment or the land would return to other uses such industrial or residential use and
you wouldn't get more wildlife. It takes quite a lot of work to manage landscape properly and carefully to
get the right habitats, and farmers need to be quite skilled to be able to achieve it.
PETTIFER: So it's for his skills as a land manager that Austin Righton is now being paid, and he's
attracting tourists. His old farm buildings are now holiday cottages. Some say this kind of diversification
on farmland could and should go very much further.
RICHARD D NORTH
The institute of Economic Affairs
The landscape would hugely benefit from a contraction in farming. I mean after all, let's suppose there were
more housing estates in the countryside. Nobody is going to buy a house in an ugly place, and the kind of
people who want to go and live in the countryside want birds and song life. They hate tractors by the way,
they hate the smell of farms. They complain all the time about that. So, okay, they go into housing estates
which are wildlife paradises. That's why they buy them. They go to housing estates which are beautifully
landscaped. There's very little in the English countryside that couldn't be improved by creative use of a
JCB.
PETTIFER: That's already happening back in my birthplace. While my old home is largely unchanged,
much of the village is unrecognisable. What were once cowsheds, stables and barns are now homes for
commuters working in towns and cities miles away. While the end of food production subsidies may mean
even more of our farmland is turned into wildlife reserves or recreational areas or dormitories for urban
commuters, we and the rest of the world still need to eat.
FOOD OF THE FUTURE
PETTIFER: In this vast anonymous building in Aberdeenshire and on 30 other locations around the UK, a
British company is aiming to join the big boys in the global food market - bigger, more automated, more
industrialised production - with very few farmers involved. On this site there are 5000 pigs. Grampian
Country Foods does everything; breeds and rears the livestock, produces the feed to fatten them, slaughters
them in its own abattoirs and packs the portions to send directly to the supermarkets. In units like this,
Grampian fattens 1.3 million pigs a year. They're also into intensive production of lamb and beef.
Why do it on this scale?
FRED DUNCAN: It just is the economies of scale. It's compatible with the size of business we've got, and
we believe that this scale suits us and also just one man can look after five thousand pigs.
PETTIFER: Are you telling me that one man looks after five thousand pigs?
DUNCAN: Everything's automated. The cleaning out is automated, the feeding is automated, the water
supply is automated. It's a very simple system.
PETTIFER: People might wonder well why no windows.
FRED DUNCAN
Chairman, Grampian Country Food Group
Well we've tried it with windows and without. At the moment we believe they're actually better without
windows. The pigs seem to be more contented and happier without the windows than they are with
windows.
PETTIFER: Fred Duncan is proud of Grampian's achievements with chicken. He's a pioneer of intensive
production.
DUNCAN: Every year we seem to improve our chicken growing performance. We're getting more
efficient at processing our chicken as well so it's getting cheaper every year. We supply 3.8 million
chickens a week.
PETTIFER: And it takes only about seven weeks to bring those chicken from egg to plucked roaster.
Grampian produces almost 200 million of them a year. Grampian Foods supply all the major supermarket
chains because Grampian provides what the supermarkets demand: Food you can trace of reliable quality at
the right price. Consumers certainly want cheap food. But the way it's produced has always had its critics.
While Grampian is happy to show the world how humanely its animals are treated, any intensive system
will be found abhorrent to some. In these great livestock factories, Grampian's billion pound a year
turnover is achieved by genetic selection, a high protein diet and temperature controlled conditions where
there's not much room for exercise.
This is another way of doing it - free range animal husbandry as practised by the Real Meat Company and
its founder Richard Guy. He's raising 40 cows free range here on Salisbury plain, and another 700 roam
equally freely on Dartmoor. He's passionate about animal welfare and has built up a company supplying
customers who turn up their noses at supermarkets and mass production, and are prepared to accept the high
cost of doing so.
RICHARD GUY
The Real Meat Company
I could have started the Real Meat Company or stood up in Trafalgar Square with a placard saying factory
farming was bad and ban it. I took the commercial route, you know, I'm not a terribly commercial sort of
person, that's not my instincts, but that's probably a way of doing it.
PETTIFER: Richard Guy's free range chickens cost up to £12, more than double the price of factory
farmed birds and they take twice as long to grow. Richard Guy is unworried by free trade. He doesn't want
subsidies, only to create a niche in the market, a brand in its own right albeit an expensive one.
RICHARD GUY: We say look, this meat isn't cheaper than supermarkets, it actually costs more - quite a
lot more in some case - but it's got a story that stacks up. Your customers can be sure they know where it's
coming from, they can visit the farms, the abattoir, any part, the lorries, the back of the shop and restore
trust big time. As I say, it sounds terribly glib, but if people want a totally trustworthy system of producing
meat well that's more or less what we've been doing for fifteen years. But in the free market sense that
means well why isn't everybody buying our meat? Well perhaps their genuine wish to pursue it fizzles out
somewhere, that's the trouble.
PETTIFER: Consumers are already comfortable in this polarised world. For those prepared to pay,
organic produce is also an option. Here in Gloucestershire, a large mixed farm produces a wide range of
organic crops and livestock. There are even subsidies for farmers converting to organic. At Abbey Home
farm, by joining with other organic producers, they've built up enough clout to supply milk to
supermarkets.
PETTIFER: These cows behind you, I mean their milk you are getting quite a handsome premium now
aren't you. I think if they were conventionally farmed you'd be getting what, about 18 pence a litre?
JOHN NEWMAN: Yes.
PETTIFER: And you're getting?
NEWMAN: 29½.
PETTIFER: Very nice
PETTIFER: With its higher prices and far from intensive methods, organic sales are tiny, about one
percent of the total, and sceptics say it will never exceed ten percent. But devotees believe that its sandals
and homespun image is a caricature that hides its commercial potential.
JOHN NEWMAN
Farm Manager
The science that is going on in organic farming is definitely in its infancy. We're still the poor relations in
terms of research and development and I think the next five years are going to be really interesting can
happen.
WILL CHESTERMASTER: The whole world will be organic.
PETTIFER: Do you honestly think that there is a possibility that the whole world will go organic?
WILL CHESTERMASTER
Organic Farmer
Probably not in my lifetime but I'm an optimist and I'd like to see a lot more of the world organic anyway.
PETTIFER: But in a whole world of free trade that's also following the money trail down the organic path,
what happens to our little producers?
RICHARD D NORTH
The Institute of Economic Affairs
Just wait till China, India, Africa, decide to flood our markets with organic produce, they'll see our organic
farmers off as well because after all these are middle class organic farmers with middle class income
expectations, and there are peasants out there that want our markets. When they apply themselves they'll
get them.
PETTIFER: Organic farming is a fashion that may or may not have a big future. But there's another
revolution in farming science that is quietly progressing, with government support, here at the Roslin
institute, home of Dolly the sheep - Genomics - and they say it'll be huge.
GRAHAME BULFIELD: Genomics is extremely important in the sense for the first time we're going to
understand all the genes in farm animals and plants and what they do. It's going to be the biggest revolution
there's been since animals were domesticated.
PETTIFER: The people who cloned Dolly the sheep now see the possibility that diseases - even foot and
mouth - may one day be bred out of existence; and qualities that appeal to consumers like low fat content
and pleasant taste can be bred in.
PETTIFER: What sort of characteristics are we talking about?
Professor GRAHAME BULFIELD
Roslin Institute
Well anything you can measure, almost anything you can measure. It's almost limitless. The only
difficulty a geneticist faces is measuring. Now simple traits like growth and milk production, and so on, but
you can go right down to esoteric traits like taste of the meat, or the fatty acid content of the meat and so on
and even complex traits like fertility and liveability and behaviour and so on. So provided you can measure
it, a geneticist can handle it.
PETTIFER: The potential of the work at Roslin to help farmers combat disease and improve quality seems
boundless, but it won't be just our farmers who'll benefit.
BULFIELD: In the developing world it's particularly important because there's large areas of the
developing world where improved breeds of farm animal or improved breeds of plants just cannot grow
because either the environment is hostile such as salt tolerance or lack of water, or in the case of animals
there's very heavy disease burden.
PETTIFER: If suddenly this means that there are large areas of the world which will become productive
which were not productive before, presumably that has relevance for our own agriculture doesn't it?
BULFIELD: Yes it is and they certainly can produce commodities far cheaper that we can, but that's been
happening ever since we started getting wheat from Canada at the end of the 19th Century, so it's not a new
phenomenon.
THE COST OF IMPORTS?
Causey Park Farm
Northumberland
PETTIFER: Five weeks into the outbreak Peter Hogg must still keep his cattle isolated. It now seems the
likely source of the infection was smuggled foreign meat in pigswill on a nearby farm. That discovery, he
says, strengthens the argument for supporting British farmers and British sourced food.
PETER HOGG
We've got the highest standards in the world and yet we're importing cheap stuff from all over the place
which is probably the cause of the disease outbreak that we've got now.
PETTIFER: Well whose fault is this? Is it the fault of the consumer do you think?
HOGG: Partly that. I mean the consumer is always wanting the cheapest stuff. They say they want
"welfare friendly" and all the rest but at the end of the day they go into the supermarket and quite often if
there's two brands, one's for 40 pence and one is for 50 pence, they'll choose the 40 pence one.
PETTIFER: As the Foot and mouth outbreak proves, imported food does need careful policing to guarantee
its safety - a daunting and ever growing task. This is Felixstowe where half our containerised food imports
enter the country. Under EU regulations food is inspected at its port of entry into Europe which means that
any container inspected elsewhere in the Union will not be inspected here. At Felixstowe it's up to the
small team of nineteen inspectors from the port health authority to spot-check tens of thousands of
containers arriving directly from all over the world.
JOHN AMBROSE
Port Health Authority, Felixstowe
There's a lot more food coming in and there's food coming in from a lot more countries previously that
we'd never imported food from. We are finding food that is not allowed in. There is prohibited foodstuffs.
We're finding for example pork sausages from the Far East. Pork cannot be imported into the UK or the
European Union from certain Far Eastern countries because of problems with say swine fever. We have
found these have been smuggled in. You do find that people will try to evade the checks.
PETTIFER: Evasions that help farmers argue against unrestricted imports. They say other countries use
tough health and safety regulations to control imports and we should do the same. Britain still produces
three quarters of its own food; so there's plenty of room for imports to grow - and the consequent health
risks. The outbreak is spreading and this is the grim reality of it. More and more farmers like Sandy Loud
in Devon are suffering the destruction of their animals, and they're very angry with the way the government
has dealt with the crisis.
SANDY LOUD: I wish Tony Blair was here actually doing this today I really do. This no need to have
happened.
PETTIFER: Tony Blair has been visiting the disease hotspots where he's not been warmly welcomed. Les
Armstrong is among those meeting Mr Blair in Cumbria. The Prime Minister told farmers that after the
crisis there needs to be a fundamental debate about their future. But with farmers in their present angry
mood, it wont be an easy discussion. Les Armstrong and his brother Brian, who is also his farming partner,
agree about the need for that fundamental debate, and as a leading figure in the National Farmer's Union,
Les will demand a clear long-term strategy for agriculture - the only thing that can offer security to the
family farm.
Blunderfield Farm
Cumbria
LES ARMSTRONG
You know, I've got a son and my brother's got a son, and we're livestock farmers. You know, we can't
envisage doing anything else. But what I have envisaged is a lot of questions have got to be answered
before we go through it again. I want some serious questions answered about what agriculture's role is
going to be.
PETTIFER: What are those questions? What are the big questions you want to ask?
ARMSTRONG: The same old question. What commitment is there to agriculture? You know, we had a
March summit a year ago where there was.. it was a crisis situation and there was going to be total
commitment to agriculture and such like. We've still had to fight for every penny since then and, you
know, arguably it's gone further downhill.
PETTIFER: Les' farm is now empty and silent.
ARMSTRONG: I got up this morning and it was most eerie when you couldn't hear your cattle bawling in
the yard. No sign of life anywhere. The countryside is dead, and a dead countryside isn't worth anything.
PETTIFER: A dead countryside without livestock is one vision of Britain in the world of swashbuckling
free trade. It's most unlikely to be that extreme, but it will be different. Many more farmers will go out of
business as we continue to see a clearer split in the way our food is produced. Very big, intensively run,
outfits like Grampian will get even bigger. They are buying land now, and they'll extend their activities
overseas where costs are lower. But small farms will survive. There'll be more hobby farmers and niche
farmers - organic, free range - offering specialised products to those who can afford them. And more land
will be used for recreation, to cater to the needs of ramblers and sightseers, some of it managed to benefit
wildlife and to enhance the landscape. Which future is the one for Les Armstrong in Cumbria? In the
midst of the crisis that's wiped out his stock he's already got an idea about how he'll survive. In the new
polarised world he's starting to think - big.
ARMSTRONG: We have to try and be positive about this, and whilst it might be a while before we restock
we really need to think which way the business is going to go. It wont start where it finished. Inevitably it
will have a dairy herd on. We might have to have a larger dairy herd, you know, if some farmers don't
come back into dairy production in this area, if we're going to remain then we'll have to become bigger to
make it worthwhile collecting the milk.
PETTIFER: So foot and mouth is clearly giving an extra push to the economic bandwagon that's already
rolling, speeding up changes already underway.
RICHARD D NORTH
The Institute of Economic Affairs
Actually.. I mean it's a brutal thing to say but a lot of the farmers will get out of the market one way or the
other and this may be the trigger, and it may be the trigger for a better thing for them in the future of
tourism, or whatever, so it may be just the knock.
MARION SHOARD
Author, 'This Land is Our Land'
We've got to look to the future and see how it should all change. Somebody has got to step back and say
hang on, farming isn't the main thing in the countryside anymore, there are other interests here, and it's a
people's countryside that we want. I mean Tony Blair talks about a people's this and a people's that. He
ought to be thinking about what a people's countryside should be like.
PETTIFER: With an election looming, Mr Blair's thoughts will be on other things. That the idea of a great
debate about the people's countryside will survive the unfolding horror of foot and mouth and the turmoil
of an election must be doubtful. Whatever happens, farmers will have to face, and adapt to, a very different
future -.one not so lavishly funded by all the rest of us.
_________
Tim Bennett from the National Farmers' Union and economist Richard D. North
will be live on line tomorrow at 1.45pm to answer your questions.
You can send them to our website ww.bbc.co.uk/panorama now.
CREDITS
Reporter
Julian Pettifer
Film Camera
Sam Gracey
Additional Filming
Alison Priestley
Sound Recordist
Tony Pasfield
Dubbing Mixer
Graham Kirkman
VT Editor
Boyd Nagle
Graphic Design
Kaye Huddy
Julie Tritton
Film Research
Eamonn Walsh
Researcher
Esther McWatters
Production Team
Leanne Ward
Susan Anstee
Kath Posner
Production Manager
Martha Estcourt
Unit Manager
Maria Ellis
Film Editors
Chris Woolley
Bob Hayward
Assistant Producers
Rachel Morgan
Rob Cole
Producer
Marc Sigsworth
Deputy Editors
Clive Edwards
Karen O'Connor
Editor
Mike Robinson
14
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Transcribed by 1-Stop Express Services, London W2 1JG Tel: 020 7724 7953 E-mail 1-stop@msn.com